A local church wants to help people find God — without needing them to be part of a church.
The Bombyx Fellows Program, led by Florence Congregational Church senior minister the Rev. Marisa Egerstrom, is a nine-month program in which participants meet in small cohorts twice a month to talk about their experiences with and beliefs about spirituality and the sacred in all its forms. It will soon enter its fourth year with a season that runs from October to June, with three trimesters themed around “ritual,” “vocation” and “community,” respectively.
“For as long as I’ve been involved in churches, the thing that’s been most clear to me is that people have rich, incredible spiritual questions, and very rarely do those people find anything to offer them in churches,” said Egerstrom, who founded the program.
“What we get to do in this program is to forge our own community and ways of talking about our own experiences that aren’t completely bound to jargon,” she added.
As part of the Bombyx Fellows Program, Egerstrom and cohort members get together twice a month for dinner. They check in about how everyone is doing, then move into some sort of activity — for instance, a group discussion, a presentation by a guest speaker, journaling exercises or a guided meditation.
Egerstrom originally created the program with a focus on people in helping professions such as social workers and therapists who wanted to use spirituality to push back against burnout. She realized, however, that that focus was too narrow, and the program is now open to adults of all ages in all professions. She also clarified that the program is not meant as group therapy: “We’re not looking for pathology here. … It becomes a place to share a quest as you begin to understand it rather than a problem-solving place.”
Ongoing passion
Egerstrom, 45, said her role is such a big part of her life and she doesn’t know anyone within 10 years of her age (on either side) who goes to a church other than hers: “I constantly have to translate how I’ve made sense of my own spirituality to literally my entire social group because none of them gets why I mess with these archaic, seemingly disconnected institutions that have nothing to offer folks.”
Still, she said, helping people interpret their own sense of the divine is an ongoing passion: “Getting to see people come to life in this particular way is the most thrilling, motivating thing I know,” she said.
“Watching people go from a place of self-doubt and languishing and wondering, with, I think, real edges of despair, ‘Is this all there is?’ and, in that place, finding something life-giving, finding something that is practical and real and makes their life richer – that’s not only important from an individual well-being standpoint, it’s also the desperately necessary missing ingredient in so much of our collective questing for community we can’t seem to find,” she said.
On the evening of Monday, Sept. 14, Egerstrom introduced five women to a crowd of about two dozen people sitting at Bombyx for an event called “Spiritual Show & Tell.” The women had taken part in two separate nine-month cohorts of the program, and each one was about to give a five-minute presentation about her experiences and discoveries. Afterwards, guests could pick up an activity book that the women had created.
Kristen Whitmore said in her presentation that she grew up Catholic, and the concept of God was always “a bearded man in the sky that’s looking down on me and judging me, and that was not the type of god I wanted to wanted to pray to, not the type of god I felt connected to or felt like was a resource for me at all.” She and the other cohort members visited Woolman Hill Retreat Center in Deerfield over the winter, where they went to a Quaker service, in which members sit in silence until they feel inspired.
Whitmore’s mind raced — “What am I supposed to be thinking about? Am I doing it right? What’s going on? What is everyone else thinking about?” — until the woman leading the service broke the silence, confessing that she sometimes has religious doubts and prays to what she called “The Great FITB.” The last part, pronounced “fit-bee,” stands for “fill-in-the-blank.”
For Whitmore, it was a revelation. It inspired her to start praying as a regular practice, but the only prayers she knew were the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary.” She chose the latter — she didn’t want to pray to a man. Instead of starting the “Hail Mary” prayer with that phrase, though, she changed it to “O Mother.”
“I started to realize that I’m not actually praying to Mary, the mother of Jesus — I’m praying to Earth, Mother Earth. And I started to feel like, ‘Oh, I can actually feel my connection to the seat underneath me. I can feel my connection to my own breath, the light that’s coming in the room, all these things that are of the Earth,’ and it started to help.”
As she’s continued with that practice, “The words still feel off for me, but it’s [a prayer] to that thing, that thing I can return to, and it makes me feel more OK,” she said. “It makes me feel more steady.”
Putting down roots
Alessia Doss had also joined the program because of a disillusionment with the religion she’d grown up with; in its place, she wanted to find a different spiritual practice or “something worth worshipping,” she said. In her first year as a Bombyx Fellow, her focus was “naming the parts of my faith life that felt true and good to me, but also rejecting the parts that felt empty and inauthentic.”
That drew her to look into ideas of creation, seasonal cycles, and nurturing, which happened to overlap with her family moving.
“I was completely consumed by creating gardens and putting roots down all over our property,” she said. “The act of digging and planting and tending and harvesting simultaneously while doing the inner work of this fellowship made for the perfect metaphor for me. This fellowship helped me understand why being in my gardens felt like a spiritual experience — and that’s because it was. Flowers and herbs were literally a gateway for me to expand my spiritual life.”
In her second year of the program, she decided to compile things that became part of that practice, like poems, art, and information about plants, into what she called an “herbal grimoire.”
“A grimoire is also known as a book of spells. This is for me, first and foremost. This book is mine. And maybe it will be kept in my family and my great-grandkids will enjoy it. Maybe I will hide it in the wall of my home for someone to dig out 300 years from now and cast a spell and bring me back to life — to be determined,” she said. “But what I love about my grimoire is it includes ideas from different religions and spiritual frameworks, and that’s OK. I’ve cherry-picked the things that resonate with me, and I did not include things that don’t.”
Her new sense of spirituality, like Whitmore’s, is likewise grounded in nature.
“Unlike returning to a doctrine that can feel somewhat static, returning to the earth feels dynamic in that no matter what happens, the seasons will keep changing,” she said. “The earth will continue to exist and hold me, and the sun will rise again.”
Participation in the Bombyx Fellows Program is $150 a month for the nine-month program. To apply or for more information, visit fccnorthampton.org/fellows.
